Israeli Attempts to Depopulate Gaza, A Brief History

On October 24, 2023, Israel’s plans to expel Gaza’s Palestinians to Sinai were leaked. This is the latest development in a 70-year long history of Israeli attempts to depopulate Gaza.

Palestinians in an outdoor market in the Gaza Strip in 1956. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On October 24, 2023, Israel’s plans to expel Gaza’s Palestinians to Sinai were leaked. The secret plan called for the construction of tent cities in Sinai as well as “a sterile zone” south of the Egypt-Gaza border to ensure their permanent exile.

The scheme appears ready for implementation. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised to attack Rafah’s 1.4M Palestinians without having said where they are to go, while Egypt is rapidly constructing a wall in anticipation of an imminent expulsion.

This is the latest development in a 70-year long history of Israeli attempts to depopulate Gaza.

In October 1956, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and occupied it until March 1957. The Israeli military proceeded to round up and execute hundreds of men in Khan Younis and Rafah. The Palestinian feeling at the time was that the goal of the massacres was to incentivize flight, as had been the case with the 1948 massacres.

And some 1000 Palestinians from Gaza fled the violence. In November 1956, the London Times reported, “earlier this afternoon that narrow gateway [the old road between Gaza and El Arish] was choked with fleeing Arab refugees, barefooted or riding distracted donkeys. Many of the refugees had taken to the sea in frail little boats.” 

Then Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion was thrilled by the specter of victory, but “shocked” to discover that “the Palestinians did not flee from the IDF as they had in 1948.”

So he set up a committee to consider proposals for emptying Gaza of its refugees. It was led by Ezra Danin, a Foreign Ministry official, involved in attempts to buy land from former Italian settlers in Libya for the purpose of settling Palestinian refugees far away from Palestine. The committee considered the Sinai, Iraq, the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere. In the end, though, US President Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza after five months, and so plans to “relocate” Gaza’s refugees were shelved.

Shelved, but also not forgotten.

 In June 1967, Israel occupied Gaza again. Just 8 days after the guns fell silent, on 18–19 June 1967, the Israeli cabinet decided it would annex the Gaza Strip once the number of Palestinian refugees there was significantly reduced by transfer to other locations of countries.

Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol received many proposals for how to dispense of Gaza’s population. The most popular idea was based on the belief that Jordan would accept the forcible transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian refugees to the West Bank. In return, Jordan would get a partial return of the West Bank on condition that it remain demilitarized. This view was held by Prime Minister Eshkol, the Minister of Police, Eliyahu Sasson, the head of the Transfer Committee established during the 1948 War, Yosef Weitz, and many others.

In fact, Israel’s plan to cleanse Gaza of its Palestinians was discussed openly in the press. In November 1967, Yosef Weitz published an article in Davar advocating for the transfer of Gaza’s refugees to the West Bank, followed by the return of the West Bank to Jordan. A group of Israel economists proposed a similar idea: 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza would be relocated to the West Bank over a longer time horizon.

Israel focused its depopulation efforts on Gaza, rather than the West Bank, because Gaza was a much smaller territory with a smaller population, making it easier to depopulate. In matters pertaining to ethnic cleansing, feasibility was key.

More importantly, though, 60% of Gazans were refugees, as compared to only 10% in the West Bank, and Israel was totally obsessed with the refugees.

It was only two decades earlier that these refugees, now living on Israel’s borders, had been stripped of their means of livelihood. Israel confiscated their property, land, animals, books, manuscripts, furniture and bank accounts. They also lost their status as imperial citizens of British Mandatory Palestine. Many were separated by force from their families and spent the better part of two decades in abysmal conditions with no political rights, no freedom of movement and no hope for the future. They had good reason to want to return home.

And if they were to return to their homes, the Jewish character of the state itself was at risk. 

And so Israel executed on a depopulation plan that, for about six months, appeared to be working. The state established a secret resettlement agency that compelled ~20,000 Gazan Palestinians (80% refugees) to leave Gaza between January 1968 and June 1968. By the end of the year, some ~32,000 Palestinians had left Gaza. Palestinians had to sign a form (in Hebrew and Arabic) declaring their departure was voluntary and they understood that they would not be able to return without a special permit. They signed with thumbprints.

But, in late 1968, Jordan banned Gazans, and the rush soon turned to a trickle.

In parallel, Israel also compelled hundreds of Palestinian refugee families in Gaza to accept a one-way ticket to Paraguay, Brazil or Libya. An Israeli agency would promise farmland or property, or help obtain new passports & jobs. In many cases, however, the Israeli offers were not fulfilled, despite Palestinian protest at Israeli embassies abroad. The result was the assassination of the secretary of the Israeli ambassador in Paraguay in 1970, which put an abrupt end to the plan. 

By August 1969, though, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir realized the project of depopulating Gaza was doomed to fail. Anyone who believed all the Palestinian refugees would “pack their belongings and leave in a caravan,’ was ‘delusional,’ in her words.

For Meir, Palestinians were not going to depart Gaza voluntarily en masse, but they could still be uprooted by force. In 1970-1, Israel went on a bombing campaign in Gaza, making 15,000 Palestinians homeless. A majority fled to al-Arish while some went to the West Bank. Meanwhile, Israel also expelled some 12,000 relatives of the Palestinian fedayeen, or militants, to camps in the Sinai.

All told, between 1968 and 1987, some 94,200 Gazans were compelled to leave, primarily young educated men looking for work. 

The Oslo Process put a temporary pause on Israel’s depopulation efforts. But, as soon as Oslo died, depopulation ideas re-emerged.

In November 2000, after the failure at Camp David, a senior Israeli military official, Giora Eiland proposed Gaza’s expansion into Sinai where Palestinians could establish a demilitarized Palestinian entity subject to Israeli control. 

Israel would give a piece of its desert wasteland to Egypt to compensate. This idea, known as the “Eiland Plan,” resurfaced again in 2004 and 2010 but then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rejected them outright.

The DNA of the State of Israel compels its leaders to want to "relocate", or "transfer" or ethnically cleanse its Palestinians. Israel wants to be a Jewish state in a land that is majority Palestinian. That's why it's in the DNA, it's inherent to the project itself. Alas, the project has reached its final destination: 1.4M Palestinians pushed to the last corner of historic Palestine, awaiting their expulsion.

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